But she’s in pain. She can’t even lift her right arm above her shoulder. And it’s all because of what she was doing on Monday.

Maureen was doing what she does every year, just putting some Christmas lights up.

“I never have been afraid to do stuff like this,” says Gile.

She had one foot on the roof, and the other on the ladder.

“I threw the lights and I was getting ready to step around the ladder and put the other one up when it came out and went from under me,” she says.

Maureen fell eight feet from the top of the roof.

“Just a little old lady falling off the roof,” says Gile jokingly.

She landed on a pile of metal. If she fell to the right she could have landed on her pointed metal gate.

“I could have broken my neck,” says Giles. “I could have died.”

But it was her heroes, Sedgwick County Ladder 34, who came to her rescue, and saved her holiday.

“As I was getting in my husband’s truck to go to the emergency room , I turned back around and here is all these firemen up on my house putting the lights on top of my house. And I said ‘You guys don’t need to do that!’ and one of them said, ‘Yeah we are the ones who have the ladder!'”

She says they did a great job.

“Oh, they look wonderful,” says Giles.

Maureen says the firefighters also volunteered to come back and put them up next year, so she toughed this interview out so everyone would know.

“I just thought that was the nicest thing for the fire department. You never hear about the nice things that they do for people, but you always hear about the bad stuff. They were an awesome bunch of guys,” says Giles.

Giles says she plans to surprise the first responders with some fresh cookies.